Who are we

Brief History of the University

Tai Solarin University of Education (TASUED, pronounced TARSUD), established on 29th January 2005 by the administration of His Excellency, Otunba Gbenga Daniel, is a unique tertiary institution in the country. Apart from being the first of its kind in Nigeria, she also shares a unique feature as the only institution in the country that offers both the Bachelor’s degree programmes in education (B.Ed.) and trains National Certificate of Education (NCE) graduates within the same academic environment.

TASUED is a transformation of the then Tai Solarin College of Education (TASCE) that was formerly Ogun State College of Education established in 1978. Students and staff statistics as at January 2005 showed that there were 12,544 both N.C. E. and Degree (full time and part-time) with a staff strength of about 669 of which 43% were teaching staff in all the 8 Schools in the College. The then College was affiliated to University of lbadan for the B.Ed programme and also worked out an affiliation arrangement with Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba – Akoko, for a programme leading to the award of B.Sc./B.Tech. plus Postgraduate Diploma in Education. The qualification status of the lecturers revealed that there were 14 or 3.9% with Ph.D.

Justification

The justification for the establishment of the university is primarily in meeting the challenges of contemporary university crisis as briefly stated in what follows. Firstly, it is generally observed that there was a poor performance of first and second year students in the universities with high proportion of them having several courses to repeat at the end of the first year in the university. This is traceable to poor understanding of those subjects by these fresh students from the high schools and poor delivery of the subjects by the teachers, who themselves do not posses the required skill. This in turn was due in part to quality of teachers produced from several faculties of education from Nigerian universities.

A specialised. university of education is expected to redress this trend by ensuring graduate teachers have in-depth knowledge of the subject they are suppose to teach like any other university graduate from other faculties, but at the same time have teaching skills to disseminate the knowledge of subject known. Secondly, though, we have heard of the specialised universities such as University of Agriculture and Technology, but the basis of the basic education foundation in this country, that is the science, method and skills of effective teaching and learning at the primary and secondary schools was never the focus of any government.

Thirdly, Nigerian university curriculum is deficient in producing graduate that could work on their own or provide jobs for other after leaving the university. The major areas of deficiency in the university curriculum are vocational skills and entrepreneurship knowledge. The new university of education is expected to incorporate these in order to turnout graduates that are not only knowledgeable in the subject matter of their discipline but well rounded with a vocational skill and have entrepreneurship knowledge to make- maximum use of the resources around him or her to be self- dependent on leaving the university.

These three main reasons might have provided the fulcrum of having the first university of education in Nigeria. The need to enhance the quality of teaching and learning in the process of human capital development in a diverse and rapidly changing technological society has come to the fore. There is therefore the compelling need to set up a centre of excellence in education, which will serve as referral to existing faculties of education in Nigerian Universities and across the African continent in the field of educational pedagogy. The specialised Education University will also serve as a melting pot for the -formulation of educational policies and as a resource centre for the Colleges/Institutes of Education across the nation and even the NCCE.